Survival is the end game.
We’re not simply living beings, we’re life keepers. Evolution may dupe us into romanticizing life, and its challenges, but not without its rewards.
Dearly beloved: using the evolved trait of inferring cause and effect, let us construct ice cream castles in the air so that we can for all eternity enjoy these wonderful afternoon sundaes. Since, as we know, man does not live by bread alone and woman does like her whipped cream with a cherry on top.
Aqueous Id, I think he’s experiencing the greatest nostalgia. Time is irreversible. He's becoming disenchanted with the truth. Maybe he’s just trying to overcome nihilism. Some people experience nothingness as something essential, you know.
If rationality were more than a superficial program it might hold up to religious programming. But tell the vulnerable mind it will live forever and all bets are off. The self preservation instinct is fully engaged, clamped to the jugular, never to let go until the sheep are wrestled to the ground, eviscerated, with nothing but scraps left for the scavengers.
My power to exorcise demons peaked last week with the full moon, but perhaps energized by your clairvoyant detection of this . . . this plaintive cry . . . I may succeed, Oh Great Zen Master. :worship:
gmilam said:
Since the new testament falls apart without the old - yes.
Notice how this thread began as bait for atheists, then all the Bible thumpers rolled into town? Of course it's probably no more than 1 or 2 people and their Sock Puppet Army of Zealots (SPAZ), trolling for Jesus. I think they get an extra virgin thrown in after the Rapture if they can make you holler "uncle".
arne said:
The events reported in The Gospels have more reliable eyewitnesses
There are no eyewitnesses. Just the irrational belief in legend as historical narrative. Events are not "reported" in the Gospel, they are woven out of oral tradition--legend.
Apologetics are useless here. Inaccuracies occur at all levels in the process of building the legend of Jesus. A few examples of some of the worst kind of inaccuracies:
(1) The link from Jesus to David is seriously flawed. Two lineages are given, which purport to trace descent from David to Joseph, who is not even Jesus' biological father. And yet the lineages do not even agree. They can't even agree on who the father of Joseph was, by which it's plainly evident that both versions are elaborate hoaxes, designed to scam naive and vulnerable minds.
(2) The legend contrives the death of Judas as an afterthought, probably to reinforce the pretense of justice for the wicked. But it's another botched invention. In one case Judas hangs himself and in the other he stumbles on a tract of land he bought with the blood money, breaking his neck in the fall.
All the more elaborate.
(3) The legend contrives the most phenomenal kind of magic, the reanimation of Lazarus four days after death. That way vulnerable readers are left to infer he was not just sleeping or fainted. Yet, as shocking as this news would be to anyone who heard it, it is only fabricated in the Gospel of John. It appears nowhere in the synoptic gospels.
(4) The Gnostic versions corroborate little or nothing of the Christian versions. They forego the legendary approach altogether, presenting Jesus as a featureless mythical archetype, wooden, as he is depicted in the Book of Revelation.
Of course we could build this list like some folks do, into "100 top flaws in the Bible", "1000 Biblical errors", etc. Personally, I prefer the way Isaac Asimov laid this out in his
Guide to the Bible nearly 50 years ago, when Bible thumping was generally regarded as a display of shameful ignorance.
Nonsense. The preferred medium for centuries was papyrus, which survives from the first few centuries as fragments. The lack of preservation makes it impossible to know where the legend of Jesus originated, what source material was used to produce which texts, whether it was entirely oral tradition or whether a corruption of some other
Code:
ca. A.D. 200 250 300 350 450
Matthew P45 B Sin.
Mark P45 B Sin. A
Luke P4,P45,P75 B Sin. A
John P66 P45,P75 B Sin. A
Acts P45 B Sin. A
Romans-Hebrews P46 B Sin. A
James-Jude P72,B Sin. A
Apocalypse P47 Sin. A
than any other ancient historical event.
More Nonsense. The Gospels are legends left as ruined fragments of papyrus centuries after the events they purport to relate. By contrast there are thousands of tablets thousands of years older, recovered from Mesopotamia alone.
Of course people wrote things for all kinds or reasons, and more than to record history. Consider this Babylonian tablet predating Pythagoras by a thousand years or so:
4 is the length and 5 the diagonal. What is the breadth? Its size is not known. 4 times 4 is 16. 5 times 5 is 25. You take 16 from 25 and there remains 9. What times what shall I take in order to get 9? 3 times 3 is 9. 3 is the breadth.
